Author: Clive Shepherd

Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We move on to the fourth part of chapter 2:
Let’s start with the constraints and there are plenty. For a start, organisations are demanding ever faster response from the l&d department. According to Bersin & Associates (2005), “a whopping 72% of all training challenges are time critical.” Some 38% of trainers surveyed in the USA by the eLearning Guild (2005) indicated that they were under significant pressure to develop e-learning more rapidly. A further 40% were under moderate pressure. The demand is felt most acutely for product training and technology training – subjects where timeliness is most critical and the content is most likely to change.
The pressure is also being felt because of increased regulatory demands. According to the Law Society of Scotland (2007): “UK employment law has moved far and fast since 1997. No other field of law has been the subject of such an ambitious, relentless and far-reaching legislative programme.” To meet legal requirements and reduce the risk of costly claims for compensation, compliance training is utilising a high proportion of training capacity.
And trainers will have to meet these demands with less budget. According to the CIPD’s 2009 Learning and Development Survey – which questioned 859 learning, training and development managers – annual spend per employee on training was down by about a quarter, from £300 to £220. Time will be as stretched as budgets, with flatter structures, less central bureaucracy and increased outsourcing.
Trainers aren’t the only ones short of time. According to an article in Business Week quoted by Jay Cross, “a third of all knowledge workers clock more than 50 hours a week, 43% get less than seven hours of sleep a night, 60% rush through meals, and 25% of executives report that their communications are unmanageable.” And in the SkillSoft survey4, “40% of those surveyed said they didn’t have time to do the training they needed.”
At the same time, there are some wonderful opportunities, not least because of the World Wide Web. As Kevin Kelly reported back in 2005, “In fewer than 4000 days we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of one billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone’s 10-year plan. Ten years ago, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: there wasn’t enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was impossible.” To help us take advantage of the Web, we are seeing a much improved technical infrastructure, with broadband connections increasingly available inside and outside of the firewall.
The rise in internet usage is topped only by the phenomenal growth in the use of mobile phones (there are currently some 4.5 billion users – one half of the world population) and other hand-held devices, such as games machines and portable MP3 players. As these devices continue to acquire increased power, functionality and bandwidth, the opportunities for l&d become self-evident.
References:

Informal Learning by Jay Cross, Pfeiffer, 2006.
The Future of Learning, SkillSoft, 2007.
Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine, August 2005.
Coming next in chapter 2: A parade of bandwagons
Return to Chapter 1
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Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We move on to the third part of chapter 2:
What about our target audience, the learners themselves? Well, some changes are incontrovertible. First of all, the percentage of graduates in the workforce has risen enormously, as a result of the increased numbers of students now enrolled in tertiary education (UNESCO figures show a growth from 68m worldwide in 1991 to 132m in 2004). This is significant because graduates are more likely, as a result of their experiences in higher education where they have to be much more self-reliant, to have developed study skills, to be more independent as learners. Independent learners require less structure and less hand-holding. In some cases, you can just allow them to get on with it.
We clearly also have a more diverse workforce, with women taking up increasingly senior positions, and immigration and globalisation resulting in a melting pot of races, religions and nationalities. Coping with such a breadth of cultural expectations places a greater strain on less flexible training methods which depend for their success on homogeneity.
Over the last few years we have witnessed the dramatic effects of second generation web technology (sometimes called Web 2.0). Increasingly everyone is a teacher as well as a learner; nobody knows everything and everyone knows something. As Glen Reynolds writes:  “Until pretty recently, self-expression on any sizable scale was the limited province of the rich and powerful, or their clients. Only a few people could publish books, or write screenplays that might be filmed, or see their artwork or photographs widely circulated, or hear their music performed before a crowd. Now, pretty much anyone can do that. And now that more people can do that, more people are doing it, and it seems to make them happy.”
George Siemens endorses this view: “Mass media and education have been largely designed on a one-way flow model (structure imposed by hierarchy). Hierarchies, unlike networks and ecologies, do not permit rapid adaptation to trends outside of established structure. Structure is created by a select few and imposed on the many: The newspaper publishes, we consume. The teacher instructs, we learn. The news is broadcast, we listen. Now we are entering a two-way flow model, where original sources receive feedback from end-users, we need to adjust our models to fit the changed nature of what it means to know.” He goes on, “We are co-creators, not knowledge consumers. We are no longer willing to have others think for us.”
And computer games have had their effect too. According to William Winn, the new digital natives (those brought up with technology, as opposed to the ‘digital immigrants’, who’ve had to learn later in life) “think differently from the rest of us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential.” As Mark Prensky  points out, “Traditional training and schooling just doesn’t engage them. It’s not that they can’t pay attention, they just choose not to. What today’s learners really crave is interactivity – the rest basically bores them to death.”
Yep, learners are changing.
References:

Knowing Knowledge by George Siemens, Lulu, 2006.
An Army of Davids by Glenn Reynolds, Nelson Current, 2006.
William D Winn quoted by Peter Moore in Inferential Focus Briefing, September 1997.
Digital game-based learning by Mark Prensky, McGraw-Hill, 2001.
Coming next in chapter 2: Have the opportunities and constraints changed?
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Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We move on to the second part of chapter 2:
A function of living and working in what is increasingly becoming, at least in the developed world, an information society, is that there is more to know than can possibly be taught. According to Richard Saul Worman , “a weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth century England.”
When the knowledge that employees need to do their jobs changes so rapidly, it becomes pointless to try and teach it all. As George Siemens  points out, “The connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.  ‘Knowing where’ and ‘knowing who’ are more important today than knowing when and how.” Charles Jennings, formerly of Reuters, takes a similar view: “The word ‘knowledge worker’ in today’s world is a misnomer. Knowledge workers actually need to hold less knowledge in their heads to do their jobs than they did 20 years ago. However, they need to have the skills to be able to find the right information and knowledge, and build it into capability as efficiently as possible.”
According to Robert E Kelley , when employees were asked whether they believed that the retention of information in their heads was important for them to do their job well, in 1986 75% agreed, while in 1997 this had reduced to 15-20%. Kelley guessed that by 2006 the figure could be as low as 8-10%.
Even in the area of skills development, l&d departments are struggling to keep up. In a large-scale survey published in 2007 by SkillSoft , “almost two-thirds of employees said they had been asked to carry out tasks in areas where they felt insufficiently trained or where they were lacking the necessary skills. When asked if they could do a better job if they received more training, 65.9% said yes.”
I’d say that requirements are clearly changing.
References:
Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Worman, Doubleday, 1989.
Knowing Knowledge by George Siemens, self-published, 2006.
How to be a star at work by Robert Kelley, Three Rivers Press, 1999.
The Future of Learning, SkillSoft, 2007
Coming next in chapter 2: Have learners changed?
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Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We now move on to the first part of chapter 2:
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
At the time of writing it is 2010. Around 32 years previously (a whopping 100000 years if you think in binary), I entered the learning and development profession. It wasn’t called learning and development then, of course, it was called training, but this appears to have been no more than a superficial re-branding.
In my first week as Finance Training Specialist, I attended a five-day residential classroom course at the seaside in Hove called Techniques of Instruction. It was run by an organisation called BACIE, now defunct. After a few preliminaries when we explored some of the pop-psychology theories about the way that people learn, we got straight down to the real action – learning how to instruct a group in a classroom setting, with the aid of a flip chart and, for the brave and more technologically-minded, some overhead projector transparencies. This course was sold on to a professional body when BACIE closed down and amazingly is still being run in almost exactly the same way today. True, it now lasts four days and PowerPoint has replaced the OHP, but essentially it’s the same.
As we shall confirm in a moment, the world as it affects the learning and development profession has changed dramatically in those 32 years. But in so many organisations (and I admit there are plenty of admirable and inspiring exceptions), training carries on regardless:

• As a default option, formal training is conducted in the classroom, typically in substantial chunks (measured in days rather than hours).
• Where the classroom is completely impractical or the subject matter of the training is less interesting to the classroom trainers, the remaining formal training is conducted in the form of interactive self-study lessons (mostly computer-assisted, but sometimes with the aid of videos or workbooks).
• The rest (and that’s the major part) is entrusted to Nellie, who passes on her accumulated wisdom ‘on-the-job’.

Now it’s possible that this strategy (assuming, of course, that it has ever been consciously thought through) is as relevant now as it was all those years ago (assuming, again, that it ever was). Change for the sake of it benefits no-one. But even the most conservative l&d professionals would admit that it is at least worth checking to see. Has the situation changed sufficiently to warrant a rethink? Could we be doing better?
In 2006, in The Blended Learning Cookbook, I suggested a methodology for the design of blended learning solutions. The first stage in this methodology was a situation analysis, with three elements:

• A definition of requirements, in terms of performance outcomes and learning objectives.
• An analysis of the target audience – their preferences, prior knowledge, ability to learn independently, and so on.
• A review of the practical constraints and opportunities – time, budget, skills, numbers, geographical dispersion, equipment, facilities, etc.

It occurs to me that these same three elements are as relevant when looking at the overall strategy as they are when designing a single intervention – after all, a learning and development strategy is the ultimate blended solution.

Coming next in chapter 2: Have requirements changed?
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Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. Here is the fourth and final part of chapter 1.
To be a professional means a lot more than simply doing whatever the client wants. You wouldn’t hire an interior designer only to inform them that you’ve already chosen all the colour schemes and furnishings; you wouldn’t engage an accountant and then explain to them the way you wanted them to process your figures (unless of course you worked at Enron); you wouldn’t employ a fitness trainer and then tell them what to include in your workout; and you wouldn’t buy a dog and then insist on doing all the barking.
So why, then, do we continue to encounter situations in which line managers tell the guys from l&d exactly what they want in terms of learning interventions, with the expectation that they’ll simply take these instructions and run. “You’d like a six-hour e-learning package to train customer service staff to sell over the telephone? A two-day workshop to teach every detail of a new company system to all employees, regardless of whether or not they will be using it? A one-hour podcast to teach manual handling skills? No problem. That’s what we’re here for, to meet your requirements.”
Hang on a minute, you’re probably thinking. This isn’t an encounter between a professional and a client, it’s simply order taking.
When asked to jump, a professional does not ask “how high?” They say, “Let’s talk about this a little, because jumping may not be the best solution for you in this situation.” And if this tactic doesn’t work and the professional is told in no uncertain terms that jumping is the only acceptable option, then he or she has two choices: either they resign and get another job where their role as a professional is properly valued; or they agree to go ahead, but only after having expressed quite clearly in writing that jumping is against their best advice.
Learning and development isn’t common sense; it isn’t intuitive. If it was then experts wouldn’t lecture at novices for hours on end; they wouldn’t insist on passing on everything they know, however irrelevant, however incomprehensible. That’s why we have l&d professionals, so they can explain, in terms that the lay person can clearly understand, how people acquire knowledge and develop skills, and how best to support this process. If the customer doesn’t hear this advice, they will assume that the people in l&d are just the builders, not the architects; and, if no-one seems to be offering architectural services, they’ll take on the task for themselves.
Coming next: Chapter 2: Time for a rethink
Chapter 1, part 1: Architects for learning; part 2: Learning occurs in many contexts; part 3:  The learning architect is a professional
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